Joseph Knight. James Robertson

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СКАЧАТЬ that Bozzy would just have to tell everybody about it. Hume who had been so terribly intelligent that he could imagine himself unable to imagine! Think himself insentient! Deny the very stirrings of his soul! Idiot Hume, too clever for his own salvation, telling Boswell, ‘If there were a future state, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people.’ A risky hypothesis to put before God, but then again, Sir John had lately been thinking the same.

      He, of course, was no atheist. When the day came, he would be able to give a fair account of himself. He had always tried to do things right. He had not wilfully done evil. Honour, courage, Christian decency – he believed in these things, had lived his life according to such standards. You were put here in this life and all you could do was get through it as well as you were able, and that was what he had done.

      Reminded of Boswell, Sir John stood up and wandered his shelves, identifying the spines of the Life of Dr Johnson. He had never been able to fight his way through the whole of that work, but there were passages that he knew almost by heart. ‘I cannot too highly praise the speech which Mr Henry Dundas generously contributed to the cause of the sooty stranger.’ That was one. He had read that a dozen times, never got beyond it to the next page. It just made him angry.

      Changed times. Dundas had spent the 1790s stalling the parliamentary efforts of Mr William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade, conscious then of the detrimental effect abolition would have on the West Indian plantations, Sir John’s among them. Yet he had shown only disdain for the Wedderburn interests when he had spoken for the ‘sooty stranger’ in that courtroom in 1778.

      It was all politics of course: Dundas had told Parliament that he wanted to end slavery when the economic conditions were right. He had meant the political conditions. But now he was out of office, resigned as His Majesty’s Secretary for War along with the rest of Pitt’s Government. Even Harry Dundas had to come to an end eventually.

      ‘Changed times.’ Sir John said the words out loud, as if to remind himself of the present, and his presence in it. It didn’t do to dwell too much on the past. But increasingly, that was what he did – dwelt on the past, or in it, or tried to shore it up against the tide. For the last twelve months Sir John had been firing off letters to various persons in the Government, imploring them not to listen to Wilberforce and his abolitionist cronies who seized on every reported brutality, exaggerated it tenfold and then claimed it as the norm in the plantations. As if one bad master made an argument against the entire system. Was a fornicating minister an argument against religion, a drunken laird a reason to abolish property? Few of these meddlers had even been in the West Indies. None of them had ever tried to rid Negroes of indolence, deceit and stupidity, to instil decency and honesty in them and raise them above the animals. Everybody could see what happened when Negroes got loose. A Toussaint L’Ouverture appeared, wielding a machete.

      This, Sir John told himself, was one reason he had wanted Joseph Knight found. Nothing to do with money, or setting up a meeting. He had wanted to know if Knight still existed. He had wanted an example.

      Joseph Knight – a Negro who had had the best advantages and opportunities, the best master, who had been instructed and baptised in the Christian religion, and who, even in these circumstances, had turned out a knave, an impostor, a traitor. If he still lived, by now he would undoubtedly have sunk into obscurity, destitution, superstition and depravity. He had been heading down that road even before the court case was over. If he could have been found, if he could have been held up as evidence …

      But there had been another reason to find him. Again, to see if he still existed, although this time it was not about the public interest. It was about locating a missing, personal landmark. Joseph Knight was missing from his life, had been these last two dozen years. Once he had always been there, quiet, reliable (so it seemed), an unmistakable, visible sign of Wedderburn’s success, of his return from exile, of his triumph over adversity. Even now, in spite of everything, Sir John would have enjoyed being able to say, ‘That one was mine.’

      With an effort Sir John turned in his chair to the wall behind the table, where there was a small etching of his father, the 5th Baronet of Blackness. His neck and shoulders protested, and he shuffled the chair round. When he looked at the etching, he sometimes thought the likeness very good, sometimes poor (unlike the Jamaica painting, which always looked poor). This was because for so long now the portrait of his father had been more real than the man: these days it was a question of asking how good a likeness his father would have been of it. It was a thin, horsy, straight face, with large worried eyes and a broad forehead capped with a neat curled wig. The etching had been done from memory by a female cousin, after the execution. His father had been forty-two when he died. Sometimes when Sir John stared at the etching he imagined his father alive again, and ageing, becoming more like him. What a strange thing – that he should have become his father’s father.

      The pinprick of a tear started in one eye, and he stabbed it dry with his forefinger.

      He could not be bothered now with the letter he had started. He had been going to write to James down at Inveresk – something about the guardianship – but it could wait. Invariably, thinking of Joseph and Jamaica made him think of James too, his only surviving sibling. Their eldest brother had died at the age of five, leaving John heir to their father’s baronetcy. Three other brothers were long dead, two of them in Jamaica, and dead also were their four sisters. John and James were all that survived of the seed of their father. With James he had shared more of the adventures of his life than with any of the others, yet in character they remained utterly different. They seldom saw each other now. To or from Inveresk, which lay across two firths and down the coast beyond Edinburgh, was a long journey for old men.

      He got up and went over to the window again. The east wind was still biting at the leafless branches of the trees beyond the small oval loch. Better to be inside looking out, on a day like this, than outside looking in. Ballindean, for all its fine south-facing location, was not the bonniest of houses anyway. Sir John had made many improvements since buying it in 1769, but more than once he had wondered how much one could really do with an old house. If he were forty again, perhaps he would knock it all down and start anew.

      Being stuck inside made him restless. He went towards the writing-table, paused. Somewhere in there, deep in one of the drawers, beneath a jumble of old letters and papers, lay a small calf-bound book, a journal, now beginning to crumble at the edges. For years he had meant to destroy it – James and he, after long discussion, had determined that this was the proper thing to do – but the journal was, apart from the painting, the only surviving memento of his young brother Alexander, who had kept it, sporadically, for four years in Jamaica. Apart from James and himself, the three brothers who had survived to adulthood had all died within a few years of one another, back in the 1760s; Peter and Alexander in the Indies; David, whom he had never really known, in London. But it was Sandy he regretted most.

      Dead at what? – twenty-four, twenty-five? Peter had lasted well into his thirties, had at least settled in the Indies, was making a success of things there when the yellow fever carried him off. But poor Sandy had never settled. And the way he had died – Sir John could not bear to think about it. If Sandy could have held on just a few years more, he might have come home safe like James and himself. Or if he had come back with him in ’63, John’s first return – that would have saved him. Now all that was left of him was the journal and the painting. Typical Sandy, to do one thing inadequately, and another thing worse. The picture was poor, but the journal was awful.

      The painting was saved by its sentimental value. It was crude and clumsy – the sky was too thick, the faces too flat – but it captured something of the house in Jamaica, and its naïve execution was Sandy through and through. It was also the only image he had of Peter. And it was part of the family’s story.

      The journal’s contents were a quite different matter. They were certainly not for the gentle eyes СКАЧАТЬ